Hacking Politics

Back in May, I wrote a piece titled "Game Change" about the remarkable fight against SOPA and PIPA, a pair of bills designed to choke off online piracy of movies, music, and pharmaceuticals.

Critics called the bills ham-handed measures that threatened the open architecture of the Internet. But their efforts seemed destined to fall short in the face of opposition from powerful lobbies like Hollywood and Big Pharma. Then, high-traffic sites like Google and reddit sounded the alarm, the Internet exploded, and the bills died.

Former Rhode Island State Representative David Segal, now executive director of civil liberties group Demand Progress, was somewhere near the center of the anti-SOPA campaign. And he is now working with other opponents of the bills on a book about the episode titled Hacking Politics. Segal and his cohorts are asking people to donate or reserve early copies of the book here to help it along. You can view a trailer for the book at the site.